Important Update: Wrapping Up Our Climbing Shoe Resoling Service

After a lot of long, late-night discussions, we've made the difficult decision to stop offering climbing shoe resoling through Gear Hut.

When we launched the service last November, we were excited to offer Reno a local resoling option. It felt like a natural extension of Gear Hut: giving quality gear a second life, making the outdoors more financially accessible, and staying connected to our roots in the climbing industry.

Over the past nine months, nearly 200 of you trusted us with your climbing shoes, thank you! It has meant a lot to be part of extending the life of your shoes instead of sending them to the landfill.

Running a small business comes with a lot of freedom. We get to say yes to ideas we're passionate about without waiting for approval from "the uppers". But that freedom also means knowing when it's time to say no and call it quits on our own behalf.

What we didn't fully appreciate was how difficult it would be to run two businesses that both require constant daily attention. Every pair of climbing shoes required hands-on, in person work from start to finish, while the shop continued to receive a steady stream of gear physical that needed to be inspected, input, priced, and organized. Neither side of the business ever pauses. Taking a day off means that the work load only built up. Both are flow-based operations, and eventually, the flow became more than we could sustainably manage. Rusty and Kyle were trying to manage resoling, pulled away from Gear Hut and Leah stepping up to handle even more at the shop on the day to day with their absence.

And so for the past 9 months, it's been persistently longer days, more evenings spent working through dinner time, fewer weekends together as a family, and very little energy left for the adventures that inspired us to build Gear Hut in the first place.

Our kiddo is growing up fast, and throughout the months, its crept into our minds that we'd traded too many family dinners, too many weekends, and too many opportunities to be present together for time spent hustling to keep the business above water. Days off turned fully into rest and recovery days. We lost some of our play, spontaneity, and joy.

Time is precious. It's the one thing we can never get back. We realized the tradeoff that the workload of resoling wasn't worth what it was costing our home life. We want more play, more memories, and more adventures together as a family. We want that flexibility that owning our own business provides. We don't want to be stretched beyond thin, constantly treading water.

To make resoling financially sustainable and worth the time investment, we would have needed to significantly raise prices - Rusty was essentially "free" labor to keep it in the green. But a price increase didn't align with our goals as a business. We wanted resoling to stay affordable and accessible for Reno.

Officially making the decision to stop was rough. We didn't want to feel like the "bad guys" taking away something that our community was so excited to finally have locally. It felt highly personal, like we were letting YOU down. But we've also recognized that continuing to offer a service at the expense of our own sustainability isn't the right answer either. There's a difference between giving up and making an intentional decision to protect your longevity in business.

As we head into our ninth year in business, our goal is to be exceptionally intentional about where we invest our time and energy. Gear Hut continues to grow, and the biggest challenge we face today isn't finding gear; it's keeping up with tasks of processing the incredible amount of gear and apparel that gets dropped off daily.

Rather than dividing our attention between two labor-intensive operations, we're choosing to focus on what we do best: helping outdoor gear find its next adventure. That means investing our time into improving the consignment experience, streamlining our systems and schedules, and creating faster turnover to handle the ever growing flow as more folk continue to learn about the shop (both on the consignment and shopping sides!).

The one upside to our decision to stop resoling is that you'll get to see a lot more of Rusty around the shop! He's missed being at Gear Hut on the daily, as so much of his time was spent behind the scenes managing admin work or at the resoling shop. He's excited to be back at Gear Hut on the day to day more often, to see all our regulars.

So! Thank you for supporting Rusty and Kyle's resoling work over the past year, for trusting us with your climbing shoes, for continuing to consign with us, and for understanding this decision! Most of all, thank you for never ending support of our family and the Biggest Little Gear Shop.

We're incredibly proud of what the resoling program accomplished, and we're grateful to everyone who trusted us with their shoes. But we're even more excited for what's ahead and look forward to helping even more gear find its next adventure. And prioritizing a lot more time for the adventures that inspired us to get into the outdoor industry in the first place.